EXAMPLE OF ROTHBARDIAN IMMORALITY: ROTHBARDIAN RENT SEEKING Under human moral in

EXAMPLE OF ROTHBARDIAN IMMORALITY: ROTHBARDIAN RENT SEEKING

Under human moral intuition, and therefore under Propertarianism, one cannot seek rents (engage in parasitism). Any profit must be obtained through an increase in productivity. That is because cooperation is irrational otherwise. And because property rights are the result of cooperation (not a natural law, not a gift of god, not a natural right, or any other such attempt at deception.)

As such, ***unproductive profit is theft that is committed by the collection of economic rents on the institution of private property***. In other words, telcos can charge by volume but not by content. That is rent seeking. The same for roads: one could charge by weight(wear and tear), but not by content. One might not permit explosives, but he cannot charge by content.

This is the very opposite of the Rothbardian attempt to justify parasitism while outlawing retaliation. Because Rothbard’s NAP is an attempt to do just that: preserve parasitism, preserve deceit, and dismiss the requirement for productivity, and to deny retaliation for parasitism and deceit.

ERIK FAIR ON NET NEUTRALITY

–“For a very long time during early History of the Internet, the Internet Service Providers (ISP) were not the telephone companies – they were independent businesses buying fixed-price leased lines from the TelCos, and they passed on that pricing structure: no usage (byte) charges.

But that’s not very profitable. So now that the TelCos are the ISPs, they want to use their Duopoly position & pricing power to extract economic rents by charging by the byte, and (if the can) charging by the value of each byte. It’s rape of the customer.

So the currently “free” Instant Messaging (IM) and Social Networks might actually cost you extra to access from your ISP, independent of anything you might be paying WhatsApp, or Facebook (if anything).

The proper Economic Policy is to divorce Internet Infrastructure (carriage of bits) from applications/protocols (what those bits mean and how they are potentially valued), i.e. AT&T should not be allowed to own Netflix. Further, we need to bring back “unbundling of the local loop”, i.e. you should be able to buy Internet service from multiple ISPs atop the exact same wires, fibres, or coax, so that we have real competition there once again, and the owners/operators of that wire, fiber, or coax must be required to charge exactly the same price per bandwidth to all comers atop their infrastructure.”– Erik Fair (Quora)

Rothbard was no less of an advocate for parasitism than was Marx.